ZEE Entertainment Enterprises has announced a key step towards the launch of the world’s first fully immersive media experience, a platform empowering users to engage all five of their senses — touch, smell, taste, sound and sight — through technology.
“This is just the beginning of an extraordinary journey, one that will change utterly how people interact with media. This platform isn’t just an extension of existing media categories, such as Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR). Instead, it marks an entirely new kind of media,” said Zee 5 Global CEO Amit Goenka.
In fact, ZEE’s innovations leverage myriad technologies, including AR, VR, 3D Audio, Digital Scent, Holograms and touch.
Added ZEE chief digital officer Chamli Tennakoon: “ZEE Media Lab revolves around crafting positive impacts on consumer experiences and human-centred design. We believe technology can change the world for the better, giving people more powerful avenues for education, business, pleasure and even enlightenment. And now, we are poised to begin delivering technologies that we believe will make the world a better place.”
ZEE, a global media and entertainment powerhouse, recently secured a United States Patent for the platform, which the company developed in ZEE Media Lab, at its Silicon Valley facility.
“Achieving this vital patent marks a leap in our march towards evolving from a media and entertainment powerhouse to a formidable, disruptive technology company. Media is changing rapidly, but the transformations tend to involve just steps rather than leaps. By researching and developing technology that brings together so much wide-ranging innovation in one package, we are racing towards our goal of complete media immersion,” said ZEE chairman Subhash Chandra.
The technology, which honours Vedic culture’s reverence for the power of the senses, will offer immersive entertainment, gaming, e-commerce and education experiences, and introduce manifold new ways to leverage powerful technology on behalf of users — from consumers to brands to educators, scientists, designers and government officials.
The platform includes:
Immersive Entertainment: Bringing everything from the beach to the fight scene into the living room.
Immersive Education: Liberating education from words, photographs and videos and making it tactile. Instead of just reading about an internal combustion engine, students instead can essentially enter one, quickly giving them previously unheard-of insights into how it works. ZEE’s Immersive Education platform will revolutionize how people learn, which will be extremely valuable not just for students but for tomorrow’s companies worldwide.
Gaming: It’s much more than 3D. Gamers for the first time will experience their favourite virtual worlds.
Entertainment Commerce: Love the lead actress’s lipstick? You can buy it through the platform, but it gets better. You also can smell her perfume, and order a bottle of that, too. For those who own 3D printers, the platform even lets you print products that you like while engaging with media.
Home Environment Control: Such rich media immersion is most powerful when the rest of the surroundings — the lights, heat, air conditioning, security system and audio assets — support comfort. The platform gives users the power to control a wide range of home-related factors.
In the near-term, ZEE will be working with partners to develop experience centres in states across the country, beginning in California. Experience centre visitors will savour potent immersive media experiences, demonstrating to them for the first time the power and possibilities of next-generation media.
Even as ZEE secured an important patent, the company is submitting multiple patent applications for other immersive-experience technologies.